It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well.

XLI

After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices.

XLII

It seems as if the able use of metaphor has precipitously fallen off since doubt was cast upon language's ability to represent the real, and yet simile, a far less interesting trope, somehow continues to thrive.

VIII

The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals.

XV

The poet must understand seduction, because even capricious human attention is susceptible to courtship.

4 comments:

I think that most words are metaphors...for images or sounds or gestures...maybe long ago we invented language to communicate that stuff inside us and outside. I live inside metaphors I think on some days.

What does it matter if there are poets and poems? It came to me night before last that when they have us board the ships that will carry us far from our exhausted planet into some unknown future, I want to be on the rocket with the poets. It doesn't matter where we're going.

About Me

I'm writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where I manage a visual literacy program. I received a creative writing fellowship in poetry from the NEA in 2013 to complete a manuscript of poems on the experiences of military families after more than a decade of war. I was a poetry fellow at the SUNY Purchase Writers Center. I'm poetry editor for the Afghan Women's Writing Project. My work has been published in a variety of journals.